Posted on 05/30/2006 11:20:11 AM PDT by boryeulb
The Senate should reject President Bush’s nomination of Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson for Treasury secretary. Under Paulson’s leadership, Goldman Sachs participated in ethically, and perhaps legally, questionable business practices. Paulson also supports the economy-killing Kyoto Protocol and has demonstrated little respect for private property rights.
On the ethical front, Paulson has refused to answer questions about his apparent use of Goldman Sachs’ corporate assets to advance his personal interests. In 2002, Paulson used at least $35 million of shareholder money to help environmental groups stop a “sustainable forestry” project in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Environmental groups had delayed the project for years—to the point where financial stress on the project developer became acute and forced the sale of the land. Goldman swept in and bought the land, promptly turning it over to Paulson’s environmental allies.
The environmental groups involved in the transaction included The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the actual recipient of the land donation from Goldman Sachs. At the time of the transaction, Paulson was a member of the board of directors of TNC—after the transaction he was elevated to chairman. Paulson’s son is now listed on tax returns as a “trustee” of WCS’.
When I confronted Paulson with these accusations at the March 31, 2006, annual shareholder meeting, Paulson and Goldman Sachs attempted to deny the involvement of TNC in the “land steal.” At a very minimum, however, tax records indicate that Goldman Sachs paid TNC more than $144,000 in consulting fees related to the transaction. Moreover, the TNC acknowledges the WCS as one of its “organizational partners.”
On the legal front, the Washington Post reported just last week that Goldman Sachs participated in transactions with scandal-ridden Fannie Mae that “that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, [said federal regulators], was always the same: To shape the company’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for executives…”
Aside from the potential ethical and legal issues surrounding Paulson, he has decidedly anti-economy and anti-property rights leanings.
Paulson supports economy-killing global warming regulation. Paulson transplanted TNC’s pro-Kyoto position into Goldman Sachs, an investment bank with no known expertise in climate science. Now Goldman Sachs not only supports greenhouse gas regulation, but has said it will lobby for such policies. No doubt this will be much easier, with Paulson as Treasury secretary.
Private property owners should also be unhappy with Paulson’s nomination. Paulson’s TNC is the world’s richest environmental group with $3 billion in assets and is a major opponent of private property rights.
A series of Washington Post articles in May 2003 exposed the Nature Conservancy as more than just a “land bank.” In the past it has also acted as a broker of too-sweet-to-be-true land and business deals for wealthy insiders and corporate supporters, often at taxpayer expense.
In one scheme reported by the Post, “…the Conservancy bought raw land, attached development restrictions and then resold the land to state trustees and other supporters at greatly reduced prices. Buyers then voluntarily gave the Conservancy charitable contributions roughly equivalent to the discounts, sums that were written off from the buyers’ federal income taxes. The deals generally allowed the buyers to build homes on the land.”
As Treasury secretary, Paulson will be in charge of the Internal Revenue Service. Should he be in charge of the government organization that has oversight over any tax problems that TNC might have?
With a Republican administration and Republican-controlled Congress in trouble for abandoning conservative principles and a scandal-ridden Washington, Hank Paulson as Treasury secretary is the wrong choice at the wrong time. Since the politically tone-deaf President Bush is unlikely to withdraw Paulson from consideration, it will be up to the Senate to do the right thing.
Mr. Milloy is executive director of the Free Enterprise Education Institute. He publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Oops - here's the link
http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae1_1_1.pdf
Federal funding is actually continuing via Medicaid, wherein the Abortion lobby and providers have seized on the Hyde Act exceptions, wherein the loopholes of rape, incest, life endangerment etc. are merely asserted. They are not aggressively investigated or challenged by SSA, "not PC".
Hence, the Administration is taking credit for stopping the practice publically, but where the rubber meets the road...they have a laissez faire enforcement approach to placate the abortion lobby...which remains largely quiescent. Almost as if there is a "Deal" on the issue, i.e., don't make a big stink, and we'll just nod and wink...
I expected MUCH more too, although cutting ANY taxes is good for the economy, he's never vetoed the first smidgeon of pork.
I was wildly pro-Bush since 2000, after a very depressing 8 years. I have been studying our history and economics for several years now, and the more I find about what we apparently were not taught by our educrats about our Govt, the more I'm leaning to the conclusion that like his dad, he is establishment.
If I may recommend some links please?
How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-15-06.ram
The Issue of Tariffs: How U.S. Revenue Collection Was Turned Inside-Out (video)
http://mises.org:88/Sophocleus
Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America's Families, Finances, and Freedom (And Limits the Pursuit of Happiness)
http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-02-02-06.ram
Big Business and the Rise of American Statism
http://praxeology.net/RC-BRS.htm
The Founding of The Federal Reserve (video)
http://mises.org:88/Rothbard-Fed
The Great Depression, World War II, and American Prosperity, Part I (video)
http://www.mises.org/multimedia/video/Woods/Woods5.wmv
Secrets of the Federal Reserve
http://www.barefootsworld.net/fs_m_ch_01.html
Jackson's 2nd Bank US VETO (very important - what he correctly and constitutionally opposed is just what we ended up with in 1913)
http://alpha.furman.edu/~benson/docs/ajveto.htm
"The Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking: The Morgans vs. the Rockefellers"
http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae1_1_1.pdf
Very interesting, but a lot more complicated than naming the three branches of government!
Thanks, got it.
I thought we did not fund embryonic stem cell reasearch or abortion.
Not as up my list as economic interventionism and spending.
Yeah, everybody gets that impression. But that's what was intended, an impression, of dubious credibility unfortunately with respect to the federal funding of Abortion. And the federal funding of stem cell research is merely limited, not blocked.
Please do check out those links I posted, curious what you think about them.
Haven't had a chance to review them all, but this one is interesting... http://mises.org:88/Sophocleus
I think Human Events has the boss-employee relationship backwards here. ;)
I have reviewed Sophocles, and I have to disagree with his views on the Civil War. Particularly where he classifies Lincoln's call for troops after Ft. Sumter was attacked...as "Treason". He Seems to miss the extraordinary powers for the President with explicit provisions in the Constitution for dealing with "Rebellion".
I thought so too. One more puzzle piece. How few of us have ever read such things or been taught of such devastation by the meddlers? I never knew any of that stuff before, beyond remembering tarrifs had been some kind of issue or an other.
Do a little digging on mises.org re: Lincoln
Click the research tab, then chose videos, wav or text to suit yourself.
There's quite a bit on him, many different writers - I've barely scratched the surface there - almost any topic in history, and economics of which history is critical to it's understanding. At least that's as I'm finding it.
The true causes of the effects.
Hi Paul,
This is very good on Lincoln.
http://mises.org/multimedia/video/DiLorenzo/1.wmv
Sorry. I categorically reject the tax-basis as the predominant cause for the Civil War. This is a rather lame revisionist history. Have you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates? The motives for fighting the secession were laid out there. And the tariff was not close to being principal.
And DiLorenzo simpy disqualifies himself to comment on the issue of tariffs, when he exaggerates the lack of Southern industry. The Confederacy didn't make those IronClads which clobbered the US frigates...without a sizeable industrial base that had been fostered by the tariffs which had preceded Lincoln's. Redistributionary arguments are only partially valid. The money would have either been kept in the U.S. or gone to Britain...and lined their pockets. The marginal savings vis-a-vis buying from the North or Great Britain are just that. Marginal. Viewing everything through the lens of consumption, with no real focus on the value of autonomous U.S. production, is skewed.
The Constitution abd the Founders made it clear, this was the preferred way of financing the Federal Government.
DiLorenzo's castigation of tariffs as "theft"...implies fairly clearly that he doesn't believe government should be funded at all. He further discredits himself when he says Lincoln "never became Christian" and that he was "Bill Xlinton times ten" as far as "Lying, and conniving". As far as being beholden to "protectionist interests" it reverses things. He believed in protectionism vis-a-vis building the U.S. There was nothing particularly sectional about the tariffs. Industry can be in the North or South. The difference initially was in labor supply. The South relied on low-skill slave labor, and had difficulty adapting its "peculiar institution" to the skilled trades...although they successfully did to some degree...but they begrudged it...because those skilled slaves were far more likely to ultimately earn their way out of slavery. Hence the Southern disinclination to encourage industrialism in their own region. It was more of a class war between the "Old" South and the New Industrialism. Not necessarily sectional at all, albeit the Old regime clearly attempted to cast it in such terms...the old sand in the eyes trick.
I have to humbly disagree. I have confidence in di Lorenzo's scholarship.
I've seen Doris Kearns Goodwin and her take, I just don't buy the 100 years of Govt hype anymore.
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